Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Will Swift and Kotlin change the era of mobile development?

When we talk about developing native mobile apps, it means having a
team of iOS developers working on Objective-C or the Android team
working on Java. Due to the differences between the two platforms and
languages, there were only a few developers that were experts on both
the platforms. However, with the introduction of new languages,
things have changed and has brought more options & opportunities
in the field of app development.

One of the most recent topics that are being discussed in the mobile apps market is Kotlin and Swift. Let’s
see what are these languages for and how the Android App Developersare using them in changing the era of app
development.

Understanding Kotlin and Swift

Swift came into existence in 2014 and is used by Apple as their
proprietary language after Objective-C for developing iOS apps.
Though it was introduced to replace the older language, it didn’t
show much of response due to the lack of system policies in backward
compatibility between each release leaving developers doubtful about
project migration. However, with the release of the upgraded version
Swift 2, it gained much trust and popularity as it was developed to
be an open source with improved user-centric approach and better
functionality.

Developed by JetBrains team, the language Kotlin was produced by
Android studio and was made available to the world in Feb 2016. If we
compare it with the old language Java, Kotlin is much better in terms
of utility and reach. The new language has been built in such a way
that it is interoperable with Java and the syntax used is easily
recognizable by the Java developers. Another thing about Kotlin is
that it is not yet declared as the primary language or the
replacement for Java, unlike Swift that has been chosen as the
language for building iOS applications.

Impact of Swift and Kotlin in App Development

We cannot deny the fact that Swift and Kotlin are the two modern
programming languages that provide a list of features that the old
languages do not support. Some of the features that the new languages
support are as follows:

Easily
readable

Lesser
verbose

Easy
maintenance

Strict
& safer functionality

More
modern in terms of syntax

Apart from the points stated above, these languages are also being
adopted as server side languages. Big giants like IBM is using Swift
to develop server side applications and Spring also announced that
Spring Framework 5.0 will be having dedicated Kotlin support. With
the advanced features of extensions and immutability that support
functional as well as procedural programming patterns, both the
languages allow developers to go for new patterns of designs. The
interesting part of these two languages is that their syntax is so
similar that it can be a confusing task to distinguish them. However,
these systems are highly accessible giving more opportunities to
developers of everyApp Development Company.Though these
languages are still in developing phase, they are going to impact the
way ideas are being approached in the world of mobile app
development.